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Comment by erosenbe0 | Hacker News Reader

He isn't describing the true state of the world. Banks, brokerages, mortgage providers, and medical entities mostly don't use oauth2 and won't use this stuff either.

The world is still old school.

Grandpa dies and I go find the paper will.

I get an affidavit from a lawyer and a death certificate with a seal from the state.

I go into the bank with a bunch of papers and they figure out what to do.

There isn't a chain of trust that the state uploads a PK signed death certificate to, which in conjunction with a PK signed 'will and trust' then triggers a preexisting blockchain contract to effect the asset transfer.

This is 20 or 30 years off. Maybe 10 or 15 in China.

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It's forever off because it's the wrong solution to a problem that no one is invested in even fully identifying let alone working at.

My hot-take parallel argument is that full self driving is a smart road problem with 'dumber' cars and not a dumb road and smart cars problem. But there's no scope to VC of profit your way into smart road infrastructure so we do it the wrong way round and hope we can throw resources at it till its fixed.

You are correct. I would be plenty happy with 80% self-driving and lots of safety features, but the VCs want the robot trucks and taxis for their trillion dollar win. No way full self-driving can do the last mile or work in all conditions. For example, human eyes have pretty decent dynamic range in dark, snowy conditions. We basically make intuitive decisions about which patch of white stuff in the dark of night is the best one to smash through to get our driveways, and I don't think the computer vision is yet discerning enough to facilitate that.

This is kind of funny to read, since in Norway basically every interaction with the government (paying taxes, filing for divorce, accessing our health records etc.) is done through an oauth2 system, the same one we use to log in to our bank accounts/get loans through. Most people haven't interacted with the government via paper in years.

https://docs.digdir.no/idporten_overordnet.html

https://www.altinn.no/hjelp/innlogging/id-portenminidbankid/

Some very few non-digital government services remain, unfortunately, and it seems like the storage of wills is one of them. Asset transfer is still going to remain a manual process though, even when digital wills are here, thankfully.

America's federalism would make this idea a mess here: Each state has their own system for everything and 50%+ of the lower-level governments/agencies (county or municipal level) don't have any digital footprint at all, even a website. For example, there are plenty of elections across the country whose official results can't be accessed online at all. You have to call in, go in person, or request mail/fax. There's basically a minimum of 50 different systems for even the most basic of government services (such as renewing a driver's license). And then you need to multiply that by all the different agencies and services. The federal government couldn't force one system for everything (there are certain things that are constitutionally up to the states), so it would be basically dead in the water since the problem is getting all 50 states (each with their own internal politics) to agree to implement the same system.

Not a problem web3 can solve either. Social Security Numbers aren't secure, but we keep using them everywhere because the political will to implement a better solution doesn't exist.

>>>America's federalism would make this idea a mess here: Each state has their own system for everything and 50%+ of the lower-level governments/agencies (county or municipal level) don't have any digital footprint at all, even a website.

Additional example: I need to pay property taxes on my mother's house in New Jersey. I'm physically on the other side of the planet. While the town has a website, it's pretty much just a phone directory. I have to call them every 3 months, usually when it's 2-3am in my timezone, ask them what the property taxes are assuming I pay them by {$date}, and then mail them checks. I can't even do something as simple as enter the property lot number in a search field on their site, have it look up the outstanding taxes, and then just pay with a VISA card.

The Federal government SHOULD be able to force certain things in the name of "regulating interstate commerce". I would think that data standards and APIs would have efficiencies at scale that would reduce friction in inter-state transactions.

> Banks, brokerages, mortgage providers, and medical entities mostly don't use oauth2 and won't use this stuff either. The world is still old school.

I work for a bank and it has nothing to do with being old school. We use exactly the same technologies as any modern startup would e.g. Serverless, Kubernetes, Cloud etc and deploy into Production with blue/green releases every week.

It's just that the user experience of our entire customer base comes first. And whilst everyone "gets" usernames, passwords, PINs, TouchID, FaceID etc they really don't understand OAuth and other federated identity approaches. Like what Google or Amazon has to do with my finances and why I have to visit their site to reset my password.

People thinking that Web3 is going to solve this problem really don't understand that it isn't a problem that needs solving.

Whoever has the ability to generate that PK is the real centralized authority.

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